


The Racing Rats

by cadmean



Category: The Malazan Book of the Fallen - Steven Erikson
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Pre-Canon, shady things happening in Shal-Morzinn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 06:56:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13048854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadmean/pseuds/cadmean
Summary: A mage-emperor and an assassin walk into a bar.There is no punchline.





	The Racing Rats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [misura](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, dear misura! :D

The _Twisted_ sat on the deceptively calm sea with as much grace as could be expected of an undermanned flagship in continuous need of repair. Someone – a deckhand, most likely, though Dancer found the idea of Nok himself climbing around the ship to be highly amusing – had lit several of the lamps lining the railing, and though they flickered incessantly in the breeze the light they provided illuminated most of the ship’s main deck.

 _Making us a much easier target for anyone on the shore keeping an eye out, too_ , Dancer thought, but there wasn’t much to be done about it at this point. Just across the water was a little port town, which they were planning to dock at tomorrow, and despite the late hour there were still a fair number of lights burning. Those lights flickered just as sporadically as the lights on the ship – perhaps even more so – and past what Dancer assumed were the smaller town buildings, a large, well-lit keep stood, its large windows casting shimmers of unsteady light out into the darkness.

The lights on the ship, meanwhile, now blinked out completely, swallowed by a swathe of dark shadows that flowed across the ship’s deck like tumultuous waves until they spilled through the railing and fell, already dissipating, down towards the calm waters.

Dancer rolled his eyes and didn’t bother to turn around. “A suitably dramatic entrance,” he pronounced, “but you don’t really need to impress me, do you? Best save it for when we actually set down on Shal-Morzinn soil.”

A huff, accompanied by the steady clack of a cane as Kellanved approached.

“You missed the light at the stern, too,” Dancer pointed out once Kellanved had come to a halt beside him.

“Did I?”

“I don’t think Nok has had time to relight it, if that’s what you mean.”

“Who asked for your opinion, anyway?!” The little mage huffed again as he leaned against the railing next to Dancer, and, with an exasperated snarl, he sharply brought his cane down against the wooden deck and the lights returned. “There. Better?”

“Much,” said Dancer, and left it at that. His gaze was once more drawn to the distant coastline, and to the lights of the town. Were there fewer of them now, or was it only a misconception owed to the distance between the Twisted and the port town? He sighed. “So. Shal-Morzinn.”

“Dreadful little place, isn’t it? You’d think, being a harbor town, that their one harbor would actually be able to accommodate any ship of proper size—but alas.” Kellanved shook his head in mock disappointment. “I’m not going to be rowing the sideboat, you know.”

Dancer glanced sidelong at him. “And I didn’t expect you to – I want to actually make it to shore sometime in the foreseeable future.”

The wizened little mage nodded vehemently at that, evidently happy with Dancer’s easy acceptance of doing all the muscle work yet again and as usual quite adept at simultaneously ignoring any criticism levelled at himself.

“Once we arrive in port, we’ll have to lay low of course – but who better suited to the task than you and I?” Kellanved chuckled to himself. “We will utilize the shadows, my friend, and we will promptly defeat all who dare to oppose us! Me, with my magic and my charm and my wits! You—with whatever it is you do, I suppose.”

Dancer rolled his eyes and, despite the proximity, idly began to wish for a rogue lightning strike to hit his companion.

His silence must have been taken as hesitation by Kellanved, who promptly went on, “No worries, no worries. We’ll get to the heart of whatever’s going on in that sorry excuse for an empire.” He paused. Looked around. Leaned over the railing, then, looking precariously close to tumbling over the edge, glanced back up at Dancer. “Well. When do we leave?”

Dancer gave a weary sigh.

 

* * *

 

Expansion was the name of the game, and Kellanved, for all his peculiarities, had shown himself to be quite adept at expanding the borders of the Malazan Empire. Nap, Unta, rapidly growing parts of Quon Tali and Seven Cities—the empire they had beaten out of the ground on Malaz Island was truly a force to be reckoned with, now.

Their armies were growing – thriving, in fact, under Dassem’s leadership –, Dancer’s Talon and Surly’s Claw struck well-founded fear into the hearts of their enemies by mention of their name alone, and their mage cadres were picking up more and more applicants as the empire conquered more land.

Seven Cities would soon fall, Dancer was sure, and the remains of Quon Tali and Dal Hon would follow suit before too long.

Only the Shal-Morzinn empire was putting up any kind of—he hesitated to call it resistance, because there had not in fact been any proper contact with them yet, but whatever it was the three sorcerer kings that led it were doing, they were doing it in quite an impressive fashion.

None of the scouts they’d sent into Shal-Morzinn lands had returned and, faced with the decision of either sending more people to their presumable deaths or giving up, Kellanved had unsurprisingly taken the third route and enlisted Dancer to accompany him on a reconnaissance mission.

“To get back to our roots,” Kellanved had supplied when Dancer had asked. _To get away from the increasingly heavy burdens of leadership_ was probably the more truthful answer, but it wouldn’t do to admit these things.

Surly, of course, had no qualms whatsoever about pointing out how irresponsible it was for their emperor and his right-hand man to both put themselves in harm’s way at the same time, and that, if anything, Dancer should go on his own.

“Best not to put all your eggs in one basket, and all that. If you both go,” and she’d given Kellanved a pointed look, “and something goes wrong, we’ll be left without an emperor and without any leadership.” She hadn’t sounded particularly worried about that last part, Dancer had noted with a raised eyebrow, but there had been other, more immediate concerns and so he’d simply filed it away as another thing to worry about later.

Kellanved, for his part, had waved her concerns off with his usual blasé disregard for other people’s opinions. He’d shuffled around on his throne, looking anywhere but at Dancer and Surly standing together side by side in front of him. “What’s the point in being emperor if I can’t go where I please?”

At that Surly had looked to Dancer for backup. Usually there would have been no hesitation in his answer; Kellanved, for all his prowess as a mage, still occasionally had to be reminded that as ruler of a quickly-growing empire, he could no longer afford to throw himself headfirst into any strange situation that struck his fancy.

But circumstances had changed, as they so often did. Surly, already firmly positioned among the leading echelons of the empire, had been making more and more attempts at seizing ever more power to herself – in subtle ways, to be fair; an additional order here and there, extra supplies diverted to her Claw while Dancer’s own Talon found themselves with less and less work to be done. Kellanved either hadn’t noticed or simply didn’t care – the two options equally likely, in Dancer’s opinion – but Dancer had begun to take care about how many liberties they afforded Surly.

 _She was a queen, once,_ he’d been forced to remind himself increasingly often lately, _and with her old kingdom now part of a successful empire, Kellanved’s throne must be looking more and more appealing by the day._

With that in mind he’d leveled a deliberately cold-eyed glare at her, casually cocking his head and replying, “Our other course of action would be sending _you_ there, Surly.”

She’d balked at that, as he knew she would.

While she deliberated her options, Dancer had walked over to where Kellanved was sitting on his throne until he finally came to a halt just a bit behind him, to his right. The daggers on his belt hung heavy and cold, but he only crossed his arms over his chest and watched Surly’s expression go from barely-veiled anger to a stony acceptance.

“Take Nok and the _Twisted_ , then,” she’d eventually said. “You’ll be able to make a quick escape, should things go wrong.”

It did not escape Dancer’s notice that Nok was one of Surly’s trusted Napans, but her suggestion appeased Kellanved long enough for Dancer to get him onto the ship, and he figured that was the important thing.

 

* * *

 

The small port town they had singled out as their entry point into the Shal-Morzinn empire was disappointingly mundane. The docks consisted of a single shabby little pier; the road, such as it was, was drowning in mud; the buildings immediately lining the docks were beaten-looking and had all of them clearly seen better days. Not the prettiest of places, to echo Nok’s earlier assessment of the town – but it was the only place easily accessible by ship, and what scouts they’d sent had all picked this backwater spot of civilization as their starting point.

Rubbing arms somewhat sore from having had to row from where the _Twisted_ was still anchored off-shore, Dancer surveyed the docks with a skeptical eye. “Perhaps our scouts simply got stuck in the mud,” he said at length, half-watching with a carefully neutral expression as Kellanved fought valiantly to get his foot unstuck from a large puddle. 

Even though it was already well past midday they’d seen no other living soul so far, which had set Dancer’s teeth on edge the moment he’d been close enough to the pier to notice; even now, having walked a good ways away from their dingy little boat, no one had come out to greet them.

Shal-Morzinn had always had a reputation for being isolationist, but this? It bordered on the ridiculous and did not bode well in the slightest.

Another long moment passed until Kellanved once more had both feet on solider ground. He looked over at Dancer. “Well then. Not a particularly welcoming town, is it?”

“No,” agreed Dancer. But he recalled the lights he had seen earlier at night time, and there were tracks in the mud that looked to have been made by boots and wagon wheels, so he added, “We should find an inn, or a bar, or the like. See what the general sentiment here is before we start inquiring about our scouts.”

“I do like the idea of us starting out in a tavern again,” Kellanved remarked as he gleefully rubbed his bony hands together. “We could start out as we did before: hire some locals, take over the place—“

“Do keep in mind that we’re here, first and foremost, to find out what happened to the scouts.”

“Spies, you mean.”

Dancer shrugged. “Semantics.”

“Either way, we appear to be in luck—look, over there, by the run-down temple that looks a bit like a headless rooster if you tilt your head to the side just like this.”

Dancer followed the direction of Kellanved’s outstretched finger, though he neglected to twist his head in quite the same neck-breaking fashion.

And, true enough: sitting in the shadow of a temple that was more a ruin than anything else, there was a small building with a large wooden sign over the door that proclaimed it to be Lissey’s Tavern.

Dancer’s eyes narrowed at the sight. “Convenient.”

“Isn’t it just? The universe must have recognized our inherent affinity for shabby taverns,” Kellanved said, and began to gingerly hop his way across the muddy road and over to the bar’s entrance. With another suspicious glance around at their empty surroundings, Dancer followed.

 

* * *

 

As he stepped into the humid tavern, Dancer was immediately struck by the distinct impression that he should really be anywhere else but there. It wasn’t a sense of threat or impending danger – those would have been easy to take care of, given his particular set of skills – but rather a tingling notion that something was fundamentally wrong with the room he had just entered.

Going by simple appearance alone it looked like any other small bar that had seen its glory days in decades long past – it reminded Dancer of Smiley’s, just a bit, though as far as he was aware, their bar had never openly exuded quite the dreadful hostility of this tavern on the edge of the Shal-Morzinn empire.

There were a handful of small, low tables scattered around the big open room, though as far as Dancer could see in the dim light, they one and all bore marks that spoke of more than just simple bar fights having marred them. What chairs there were all leaned slightly to one side or the other, and the bar, far at the other side of the room, was of such a deep dark wood that it at first glance appeared as if someone had cut out a piece of solid darkness. Even the barkeep hunched behind it had a strange air of etherealness about her – all of it set Dancer’s teeth on edge, and despite his best intentions to the contrary he had his longknives in his hands before the door had completely fallen into lock behind him.

Kellanved, of course, either didn’t notice or, which Dancer thought more likely, simply didn’t care and strode right up to the bar. He pounded his spindly fist down onto the wood, opened his mouth as if he was about to say something – then closed it again just as quickly, cocking his head to the side and giving the barkeep a long look.

Said barkeep, a quite stout lady with a so far permanent scowl etched onto her lips, said absolutely nothing as she turned away and disappeared into some back room.

Kellanved fidgeted where he stood. He slapped the bar top again – and predictably, nothing happened. With an angry snarl he turned to where Dancer was still standing in the doorway. “This is _atrocious_ service!” A pause. “Perhaps we should hire her.”

For all appearances possessing a great sense of dramatic timing, the barkeeper returned just then, followed by a tall, spindly-looking man in flowing robes just a shade lighter than the bar. She gave a curt nod in Kellanved and Dancer’s direction and the man, without quite moving the rest of his body, swiveled his head over to look at them.

As their eyes met, Dancer suddenly found himself strikingly glad for the knives already clutched in his fingers. The man, for his part, showed no reaction at all to the blades now glinting in the low candle light, instead regarding Dancer with an air of cool indifference. His eyes were piercing as they swept up and down Dancer’s form, briefly coming to rest on his baldric and the other knives he wore openly on his belt. Dancer did not shiver when he finally turned that cold gaze on Kellanved -- but it was a very close thing.

 _Gods below_ , he thought. _What have we gotten ourselves into this time?_

It took just a bit longer before the man had apparently gotten the measure of Kellanved as well – and what a sentence that was, Dancer having to grimace just at the thought – , for he nodded in his direction and said, “Meanas?”

“Ah,” came Kellanved’s quite eloquent answer, while Dancer edged himself closer towards his companion and the man in the shifty robes.

The mage – for that’s what he must be, if he was able to discern Kellanved’s chosen warren with only a glance – betrayed no emotion whatsoever. “And outsiders, at that. Do you know what we do with outsiders, here in Shal-Morzinn?”

“Greet them warmly?” Kellanved offered, beginning to take small steps backwards as well. It was this, more than anything, that made Dancer truly afraid – Kellanved didn’t back down from anything if he could help it, and on the rare occasion when he found himself forced to do so, it was only with grave threat to his life.

The Shal-Morzinn mage simply replied, “No,” and cleared the waist-high bartop in front of him in one smooth leap and reached for Kellanved with hands now blistering with a sickening energy stinking of old, cold death.

Dancer himself was surging forward as soon as the mage moved, knuckles white as he gripped his knives; Kellanved, surprisingly enough, had managed to trip over an uneven part of the floor just in time to escape the Shal-Morzinn mage’s first lunge.

Shadows bled out from under Kellanved like blood, thick and viscous, and as Dancer dashed towards him the shadows licked at his heels—

And dragged him back and away from Kellanved.

He let out a confused shout but could only watch in horror as the Shal-Morzinn mage got his hands on Kellanved’s slight form, hands still wreathed with the tell-tale signs of warren manipulation grabbing a white-knuckled hold of Kellanved’s shoulders as he bore down on him.

Kellanved for his part stood stock-still while the shadows danced all around him. He looked over his shoulder, and Dancer saw that his eyes were wide as he shouted, “Dancer, _go_!”

Still Dancer hesitated—

And before he could do much else, Kellanved reached out and _pushed_ , and the shadows, which Dancer had been coming to slowly think of as a sort of home, leapt out and forward and threw him clean through one of the windows at the front of the tavern.

Accompanied by a cascade of broken glass and swiftly-fading shadows, Dancer fell.

 

* * *

 

The little port town’s rooftops were just as dirty as any other city’s, a fact which Dancer noted with muted disdain as he crouched on a particularly shabby patch of tarred hay, waiting for night to fall.

It had been easy enough to shake off the townspeople pursuing him – for all of the Shal-Morzinn empire’s apparent prowess when it came to magery, the three sorcerer-kings’ manpower Dancer had most definitely found wanting. To be perfectly honest – and he prided himself on his honesty, these days – it had completely taken Dancer by surprise when, as soon as he had picked himself up from out of the mud outside of the tavern, the doors of the adjacent buildings had burst open and various forms bearing arms had come charging towards him. He’d dodged the first strike of an abnormally large halberd, and the second, third—he’d made good on his escape by the time a large, lumbering figure bearing an axe had stumbled towards him.

Thankfully all but three of his pursuers he’d managed to lose within the span of barely half a bell, and the remaining three, who had managed to follow him up to the top of an old belfry, had only put up a pathetic excuse of a fight.

Dancer had quite liked the idea of the pursuers’ bodies only being found once the crows and carrion eaters arrived to gorge themselves, but even as he had watched, the bodies had dissolved into the sort of bony, mulchy substance he usually associated with long-forgotten corpses. He’d fled the bell tower as fast as he could, then – no sense in staying around where the Shal-Morzinn mage’s magic was so clearly at work. Faced with no other option Dancer’d taken to the rooftops, leaping and crouching and generally feeling as if he’d gone right back to his first days as a freelance assassin.

He didn’t care for the throwback a single bit.

Usually, Dancer liked to think that he had a comparatively secure grip on his emotions – considering how unpredictable Kellanved was even at the best of times, he almost had to be. But sitting there on the rooftop, back pressed to a crooked and coal-blackened chimney, Dancer allowed himself a brief moment of despair.

Kellanved was captured. Effectively gone.

To be perfectly fair, over the course of their partnership this had become somewhat of a frequent occurrence for the both of them. As their empire grew there had always been those who thought that taking either one of them into forced custody would gain them the upper hand.

But usually it had been Dancer waiting for Kellanved to appear from out of some particularly dim and dreary corner to rescue him; usually, of course, Kellanved was more than capable of just disappearing himself into the Warren of Shadow and so escape any unkind attention.

This situation Dancer now found himself in was, therefore, wholly new and entirely discomfiting.

Gritting his teeth, he leaned his head back against the chimney and took several deep breaths and watched the sun set. The Shal-Morzinn mage, so steeped in sorcery that even Dancer could feel it, must have taken Kellanved by enough surprise for him to have no time to slip into Shadow. Either that, or – and he pushed the thought back down almost immediately – the mage had somehow managed to outright prevent Kellanved from accessing his Warren to the extent necessary for him to enter it.

If it was magery preventing Kellanved from leaving, if it was the Shal-Morzinn mage keeping him from his Warren – then Dancer’s next course of action was as clear as it was simple.

Get Kellanved. Kill the mage.

The most obvious destination for both objectives was, of course, the large keep sitting at the center of the town – but exactly because of its obviousness, Dancer was hesitant to get fixated on it too soon. If he were to have abducted the ruler of an enemy empire, the last thing he’d do was then take him to the most obviously defendable building in town. No structure was impenetrable, as Dancer himself could readily attest, and drawing attention to it by any means just meant that people like him had more opportunities to infiltrate it. If it were him doing the kidnapping, therefore, he’d hide Kellanved in some nondescript building in some unremarkable part of town with as few guards as possible and leave him there.

But he now found himself in the unforgiving role of rescuer instead, and, entirely unwilling to go through all the town’s buildings one by one, the keep was by and large the most attractive alternative, no matter how obvious a trap it was.

He may not have possessed any of Kellanved’s natural easy command of the Warren of Shadow, but nevertheless Dancer liked to think that frequent exposure had at least given him a slight affinity for it, if nothing else. Wishful thinking or not, the shadows coalesced around him and gently caressed his cloaked form as he stalked the rooftops, drawing ever closer to the lit-up keep sitting dead center in the middle of the port town.

 

* * *

 

The keep, Dancer quickly realized, was about as defensible as it had appeared from the rooftops, which was to say that even Surly’s worst trainees would have had little difficulties in entering it.

For one, there were no guards – Dancer didn’t particularly mind that part, as he was reluctant to find out whether all of the people in this town had a tendency to dissolve into years-old corpses the moment the life left their bodies. There also weren’t any servants or the like around either, however, which, coupled with the absence of any guards, struck Dancer as disturbingly unnatural as the empty town itself had.

There was something very wrong with the Shal-Morzinn empire, he decided, if this was what all their towns were like. It also explained why the scouts they had sent had all disappeared – if they were the only living souls to set food in a given place, of course they would be singled out. And perhaps they, too, were secreted away somewhere inside this suspiciously empty keep.

It was probably for the best that Dancer had never been the type to believe in slim hopes.

Nevertheless he kept an eye and ear out for any sign of life as he stalked the corridors of the keep, hugging close to the walls more by force of habit than any practical necessity. Made mainly of stone and a few wooden inlays, the keep’s interior was lit so brightly that there were only very few shadows to be found – if he were to chance upon an enemy in here, Dancer would either have to quickly take them out or do his best to hide behind one of the dead-looking plants lining the corridors at seemingly random intervals.

All the doors he’d found so far – and there had been quite a few of them, of various makes and quality and materials – had been unlocked, and though the rooms behind them were all lavishly decorated and brightly lit, they were also all impressively devoid of life. It wasn’t just the fact that he still hadn’t encountered even a single rat; no, what quite literally made the hairs on the back of Dancer’s neck stand up was the feeling of death that permeated the whole keep.

It was strangely reminiscent of the Deadhouse Kellanved and he had been forced leave behind in Malaz City, though again the feeling this place emitted was more immediately hostile and foreboding than the Deadhouse had ever been, even in the beginning when he was still getting used to it.

There was a connection there, he was sure, but he had neither the time nor knowledge to investigate it – and so before long Dancer stopped meticulously checking each and every empty room he encountered, and instead just kicked them open haphazardly and with increasingly less patience for it all.

Perhaps he had been right in his assumption all along—perhaps the Shal-Morzinn mage hadn’t taken Kellanved here after all. Dancer didn’t think that he was dead, and not wholly because the thought was preposterous; if Kellanved had passed through Hood’s gate, he was sure he’d have felt _something_ , if only a great godly sigh as Hood realized who he would now have to bother with.

Lacking that, as well as any sign of anyone besides him having actually set foot in the keep, Dancer opened the next large set of double doors—

And immediately stilled.

Where before there had been utter silence broken only by his own footsteps and increasingly agitated breathing, there was now the sound of conversation, of cutlery scraping against plates, of glass clinking and liquid sloshing.

Carefully he pushed the doors open a bit further. Beyond them he found a small balcony, which a few steps forward revealed to be overlooking what appeared to be a large dining room. Stairs led down to the main floor from where Dancer had entered but he disregarded them for now, instead slowly moving over towards the banister to get a good look at what exactly was happening.

At the head of a long table, just below the balcony where Dancer was standing, sat the Shal-Morzinn mage from the inn. To his right – and Dancer felt a rush of relief at the sight – sat Kellanved, looking very much put-upon as the Shal-Morzinn mage continued to offer him various rotten-looking foods and off-color drinks. All the while the mage kept up a seemingly steady stream of conversation, which Kellanved, to Dancer’s great surprise, only joined in occasionally; mostly he nodded or shook his head or gave scathing, if short, answers.

“—thought you might come,” the Shal-Morzinn mage was saying, “but we expected you to do so with an army at your back. It’s better for us this way, of course, and we’re certainly not going to complain, but it is a bit disappointing, to be sure!”

“Can’t have everything,” Kellanved replied with a shrug and the lightest of fingertaps against the heavy oaken top of the table.

“I suppose not. But what about that assassin of yours? We heard the two of you are never that far apart—where’s he now, then?” The Shal-Morzinn mage laughed raucously. “Has your shadow abandoned you, old man?”

“Here’s the thing about shadows,” began Kellanved, tapping the tabletop lightly again, and Dancer, by now well-versed in his partner’s preference for dramatic timing, chose that point in the conversation to drop down from the balcony and stab his knives into the small, vulnerable space just below the mage’s ribs.

Almost immediately the mage crumpled back into him with a wet, choked-up gasp – and yet instead of slowly sagging into lifelessness, like the bodies in the bell tower the Shal-Morzinn mage, too, quickly dissolved into a dripping mess of bones and ligaments.

Dancer stood there, not quite sure whether there was any point in trying to wipe the mess off of his clothes. When Kellanved continued to stare at him as if he were some kind of shadowy apparition, Dancer said at length, “Well, we _do_ have a sizeable army ready to invade as soon as we give the signal, he had a point there.”

Kellanved remained silent, his wizened face scrunching up in what was either careful deliberation or an attempt to make it seem as if he had any idea of what was even going on. Eventually, he replied, “We do indeed have an army – and quite a formidable one at that. But where, dear Dancer, would be the fun in using them?”

“I don’t count being thrown through a window as fun, for the record.”

“Oh, really? I thought it looked quite impressive, and you seem to have come out of it fairly well—“

Dancer let out a low chuckle, then quietly asked, “And you? Are you alright?”

At that Kellanved sagged in on himself and let out a long sigh. “I am now,” he told Dancer with a slow incline of his head. Then the maniacal gleam returned to his eyes, and he added, “Though you may want to take a step back—he’ll return any moment.”

“What?” But Dancer took a couple of steps back regardless, habit and subconscious self-preservation leaving him with just enough time to watch the bones and rotted meat slowly begin to twitch and move as it once more started to take on the form of a human. “Oh.”

“Exactly.” Kellanved quickly leaned across the table to grab a few leafs of paper from out of the robes only half-covering the remains of the Shal-Morzinn mage. He stuffed them into his own seemingly fathomless robes, then sprung out of his chair and, taking a handful of Dancer’s cloak, began half-dragging, half-leading him towards a set of glass doors located just beneath the balcony. “Now that you’re here, let’s make a run for it before he comes back entirely.”

Dancer found it difficult to argue with that.

Neither of them bothered to shut the glass door behind themselves but hurried down the corridors at an increased pace, Dancer just slightly in front of Kellanved and still dripping the occasional bit of gore down onto the stone floor.

“Why didn’t he kill you?” Dancer asked as they rounded another corner. He didn’t quite go so far as to pride himself on his sense of direction, but even then he had always had a good feeling for the layout of any given place – not so here in the keep. But he supposed it didn’t matter, now that Kellanved was here with him and theoretically able to shift them into the warren of Shadow.

A shrug from Kellanved. “He seemed interested in our warren, and also why we kept on sending scouts into his lands. I suppose he didn’t want to try to kill me,” he emphasized the last few words to a ridiculous degree, “until I had told him everything I knew. Ridiculous, of course! My knowledge spans such breadths and depths and, ah, whatever else knowledge spans—“

“Why didn’t _you_ kill him, then?”

Kellanved huffed angrily at that. “I was going to! And I did!” He rummaged through the various folds of his robes until, with a triumphant crow, he produced a small glass vial. Wagging a finger at Dancer, Kellanved explained, “The quickest way to a man’s heart is, as so many proverb-spouting people will happily tell you, through his stomach. So I thought I’d use that against him.”

Dancer narrowed his eyes, glancing back and forth between Kellanved and the small vial he was holding before asking in a disbelieving tone, “You were going to poison him?”

“What? No. I was going to offer him proper food and then while he was distracted you were going to stab him in the stomach and maybe get his heart, too, for good measure – he’d have been expecting poison, but hah! A knife! He didn’t even see it coming.”

Dancer blinked. “What,” he eventually asked, “would you have done if I hadn’t shown up?”

Kellanved stopped short, turning to give Dancer a blank look as if he hadn’t even considered the possibility. “Well. You did show up, didn’t you? As I knew you would.”

Burying his face in his hands in either exasperation or strange fondness seemed like a good idea just then – but as they rounded yet another corner the hallway opened up into another large room, and there, just in the center of it, stood a tall, lean man in strangely shifting robes.

Dancer had his knives drawn and would have charged the moment he caught sight of the man, had not Kellanved snapped out his walking stick to hold him back.

“Let me handle this,” the little mage whispered so loudly that Dancer was sure the man must have heard – but no reaction from him. He just continued to stand there, surrounded by what Dancer now realized wasn’t a large room at all but rather an uncountable number of mirrors – and the Shal-Morzinn man was not reflected in any of them.

Next to him, Kellanved waved at the man who was still looking towards them with a strangely vacant expression.

“Greetings, you there! I do believe we’ve just met your twin brother,” he began with an astonishingly innocent shrug back towards the hallway behind them.

Dancer, still clasping his daggers tightly, nodded and added, “Lovely fellow. Very courteous.”

And Kellanved, “Also: dead,” and a blast of shadows swept out from him and hit the man still standing in front of the mirror dead in the chest.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then one of the mirrors shattered, and the mage, still standing, was engulfed in a ball of fire – it raged for a moment, then died down just as quickly. Dancer noted with a heavy heart that if anything, the man now looked healthier than he had before.

“Well,” said Kellanved, just as the man opened his mouth and spoke in a low, sonorous voice, “You.”

Kellanved flinched back behind Dancer. “Also him! It’s not just me this time!”

The man chuckled. “I noticed.”

“Are you in charge here, then?” Dancer asked to fill the silence and hopefully give Kellanved enough time to figure out what to do, since as things stood Dancer was quickly beginning to doubt the usefulness of his daggers.

Just then, the doors at their backs were thrown open again. There was the slow, steady sound of measured steps, and though Dancer didn’t dare turn his back on the mage with the mirrors, he felt a bone-deep chill pass through him as on either side of him two men slowly walked past.

To his right, what appeared to be the man from the tavern. Put into direct contrast to the mage still standing in the center of the room, he did appear to be just a bit more on the lean side – his face was deathly gaunt, and his hands like spiders where they peeked out from the sleeves of his robe.

To his left, yet another man almost identical to the other two. This one was of astoundingly average build, and his robes hung slack around him without any of the ethereal quality the ones the other two were wearing had; in fact, the only thing that struck Dancer as remarkable about him were his eyes. White as a blind man’s, they burned with an intense glare that reminded Dancer of the sun itself – bright, burning, deadly.

Both he and the mage from the tavern walked past Dancer and Kellanved without sparing them any second glances, instead heading straight for the their companion and arraying themselves beside him.

A pregnant pause came and went just as quickly as Kellanved lifted his walking stick and pointed at each of the three men in turn. “Hood’s own,” to the mage they had first met in the tavern, “Telas,” the one in the middle, so fond of mirrors, “Thyr,” to the mage with the bright eyes. Turning to Dancer, he then said, “I do believe we now find ourselves in the company of the Three, Sorcerer-Kings of Shal-Morzinn.”

“And you, emperor of Malaz,” the mage from the tavern said. "Between heads of state, then."

The one in the middle, “This may be a bit trite and overly dramatic,” and the one with the brightly-lit eyes, “but you can’t continue running around our empire. Submit yourself to imprisonment, or submit yourself to death.”

The mage from the tavern, wielding Hood’s warren, nodded gravely. “The choice is yours.”

“Er,” said Kellanved, echoing Dancer’s own sentiments. “Can you give us a moment to talk this over?”

Looking at the three mages – sorcerer-kings – now arrayed in front of him and Kellanved, Dancer had the distinct and quite terrible feeling that the two of them were desperately outclassed.

“Get us into Shadow,” he hissed at his companion. “I’ll hold them off—how long do you need?”

Immediately, Kellanved replied, “As long as possible, but we’re not going to get even a fraction of that if the Hood-touched mage is around. He’s—Hood and Shadow, they don’t get along particularly well, I fear. You’ll have to take him out – I’ll provide you with some back-up, but you’ll have to do the, ah, thing,” he trailed off, gesturing a stabbing motion. Dancer nodded his agreement much more somberly.

With a grand, sweeping gesture Kellanved then turned to properly face the three Shal-Morzinn mages again. “It’s time to call on my trump card, then, is it? Shall I summon my demon to lay waste to you all? Very well, very well,” crowed Kellanved, and with a sharp gesture of his arms, he opened his warren in the space just between the two of them and the mages.

 _The Hounds,_ Dancer thought with a shiver as panic set in. _If he summons the Hounds in here, they’re just as likely to savage us as the Shal-Morzinn mages—_

A paw edged its way out of the warren. It was set down onto the stone floor with great care before another followed it, and another, and another – a tail, long and furred, flicked back and forth as an uncannily round face blinked against the stark light suffusing the room. With dramatic finality the warren then closed, and they all beheld the creature that had come to deliver imperial judgement on the Shal-Morzinn mages:

“ _What_ is that?” the Hood-touched mage asked.

At the same time, Dancer let out a furious, “Kellanved—“

Kellanved, meanwhile, he levelled one bony finger at the Shal-Morzinn mages and shouted, “Go get them, Demon!”

And the Nacht, for once in its life, followed Kellanved’s orders and charged the mages.

Dancer watched in astonishment as they scattered before the creature, throwing their warrens at it but never quite seeming to manage to actually hit the thing – then, unwilling to let himself be outdone by that damned Nacht of all things, he singled out the Hood-touched mage and sprung into action, flinging two of his throwing-knives at the man.

They would have struck true had it not been for a blast of white-hot fire burning them up in midair – Dancer whipped his head around just in time to see another wall of fire heading directly towards him. He ducked and rolled and managed to avoid the worst of it, though his cloak now felt significantly lighter near the edges.

Not once taking his eyes off of the Hood-touched mage now alarmed to the approaching threat by the Telas mage, Dancer threw two more light knives. These went wide without any outside interference – as they were intended to, and as his target’s eyes flicked briefly to follow the arc the blades cut, Dancer crossed the last bit of remaining distance.

With a triumphant smirk Dancer sunk his knives once again into the Hood-touched Shal-Morzinn mage’s kidneys, jumping back just in time to avoid the rapid decomposition—but not quite far enough to escape the blast of pure, searing light leveled at him.

The blast hit him in the shoulder, numbing his arm and ribs and a good part of his leg as soon as it made contact. The force of it threw him back and all but sent him flying until a wall stopped his trajectory – the impact knocked the breath right out of him and numbed the other side of his body as well, so that there was not much else he could do but sag down to the ground and try to blink the encroaching darkness away.

A bony, long-fingered hand clasped at his shoulder and dragged him back up. “Ready,” said Kellanved. Wheezing and gasping for breath, Dancer nevertheless managed a nod as he half-leaned on the little mage’s shoulder.

“Let’s.”

With a dramatically world-weary sigh, Kellanved raised two fingers to his mouth and whistled. The sound was sharp, cutting through the din of the fighting as cleanly as a knife would have parted flesh. In the silence following it, the two remaining Shal-Morzinn mages stopped in their tracks while the Nacht, having taken position somewhere on top of a large pillar, left its perch and sped towards where Kellanved and Dancer were now standing shoulder to shoulder.

Clearing his throat in a typically exaggerated effort, Kellanved once more leveled the end of his cane at the mages. “I’d say it was such a pleasure to meet you, except that it honestly wasn’t at all. Please don’t feel the need to reciprocate our visit here, because I promise: it will go badly for you.” He nodded gravely. “And now—farewell.”

Behind the mirrors, one of the torch-lit sconces set into the walls blinked out. It was quickly followed by another, and another; the closer the darkness got the more it became apparent that instead of simply winking out, the light was instead suffocated by a rolling tide of shadows until, at last, no light at all remained and the room was thrown into complete darkness.

“Got them all this time, hah!” cackled Kellanved before Dancer could clamp a hand over his mouth to shut him up.

And, as expected: out of the darkness streaked a ball of flame, barely missing Kellanved; and near where the mage with the bright eyes had last stood, light was slowly beginning to return as well—

But the shadows—true shadows, deep and clean-cut—had already grasped hold of Kellanved and Dancer—

The Realm of Shadow welcomed them with an achingly familiar embrace.

 

* * *

 

They appeared on the deck of the _Twisted_ in a burst of shadows.

It took a good, long moment until Dancer was able to find within himself the fortitude to brace himself against the railing behind him and stand up. With a worried glance at Kellanved, who was lying in a heap next to him but looking otherwise unharmed, he took a quick survey of his surroundings – the ship and its crew, already gathering around the two of them, looked unharmed. It was a relief, and Dancer allowed himself a moment to simply breathe. Then, while his companion continued his best impression of a pile of rags on the ground, Dancer shouted, “Nok! Get the _Twisted_ out of here!”

An acknowledging shout was heard from across the deck, and slowly, the crowd began to disperse again.

Next to him, Kellanved began the arduous and apparently monumental task of getting up into a sitting position. “We’ll just return at some later point,” he managed to press out in between gasps for air as he stood up completely. Part of his cloak was faintly smoldering at the edges, evidently having been grazed by the mage’s earlier blast of fire.

Dancer nodded. “Later.”

“Much later.”

“Preferably with a cadre of high mages at our backs.”

“That would be ideal, yes. Perhaps we should add in three armies and Dassem as well, just to be safe.”

“I’m glad we’re in agreement here,” said Dancer, now stepping over to swat at Kellanved’s burning robe with what remained of his own hooded cloak.

His companion, though now starting to exude a quite frankly startling amount of smoke, paid no attention to it, instead already motioning for the rest of the gathered crew to continue going about their business. “Likewise.”

The two of them stood there for a moment of silence.

“Well,” began Kellanved, his cane having appeared at his side once again and leaving him free to tap it against the deck in an erratic rhythm, “I’ve everything we needed from that place, so at the very least the journey wasn’t as much a waste of time as I originally feared.”

“The papers?”

“Aye. Studies on the Warrens, and the ways they interact with each other in different combinations—not particularly groundbreaking work, but it will be nice to have.” A pause. “Nice to burn, as well.”

From further down the deck, Dancer could hear Nok continuing to shout orders. The wind was in their favor, he figured, and the quicker they were out of Shal-Morzinn’s reach, the better.

Still: “We didn’t find any sign of our scouts, Kellanved. The usefulness of your stolen research aside, our mission was a failure.” And it galled, that failure.

Without looking at him, Kellanved leaned back against the ship’s railing and raised his face up to the sky. The perpetual hood he liked to affect fell back, revealing a face line deeply with age, and his eyes, though they usually betrayed his somewhat younger true age, now reflected a bone-deep weariness. “They were soldiers of the empire. And soldiers die.”

“But it’s our empire, and our soldiers, and we sent them into a situation they couldn’t possibly walk away alive from,” Dancer replied before trailing off, not quite sure where exactly he wanted to go with this line of argument. Following Kellanved’s lead he likewise raised his head to blink up towards the sun, but the glare was too bright, too harsh, and he quickly drew his hood back up again as far as it would go.

They stood like that for a good handful of breaths, watching the waves and the sky as the ship picked up speed.

Then Kellanved clapped Dancer on the shoulder. “Well, no point in moping around. At the very least we now know where to send Surly when her ambitions for the throne become too much of an annoyance for us.”

“You were actually paying attention to Surly?”

“Of course! As all emperors should, I know exactly what each and every one of my citizens and minio—subordinates is up to! I even know what you’re up to—I even know what _I’m_ up to!”

Dancer snorted at that. “Do you, really?”

Nodding gravely, Kellanved said, “I do indeed. Right this moment, for example, I'm planning to take a look at the papers I liberated from the Shal-Morzinn, only that, funnily enough, I seem to no longer be able to find them. As that is just a bit worrying, I’m now looking around in the vague hope that I dropped them somewhere—“

A flash of white from the corners of his eyes caught Dancer’s attention, followed by the triumphant shriek of a Nacht from high up above in the ship’s rigging.

A moment passed, during which both Dancer and Kellanved watched several ripped pieces of paper float down and settle haphazardly onto the deck.

“And what are you up to now, then?”

Kellanved pushed up the long sleeves of his cloak to his elbows. “Now,” he said from out between gritted teeth, “I’m going to find that Nacht and exact my terrible, awful, incredibly impressive revenge on it.”

And off he went.

 

 


End file.
